Nestle Chairman Brabeck Says Biofuels Helped Boost Food Prices

Jan. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Biofuel production from agricultural
commodities has contributed to surging world food prices in the
past decade, said Nestle SA Chairman Peter Brabeck-Letmathe.

Blaming the tripling of the price of some food products on
speculation is “completely wrong,” and politicians have failed
to consider the link with energy markets, Brabeck-Letmathe said
at the Global Forum for Food and Agriculture in Berlin.

“It is really unbelievable that when we have insufficient
food in our world that we give it to cars,” Brabeck-Letmathe
said. “I plead very openly, no food for fuel. Give the food to
people but not to cars.”

World food prices as tracked by the United Nations’ Food &
Agriculture Organization have more than doubled in the past 10
years, while the U.S. price of corn, a raw material for ethanol,
has more than tripled.

“Financial speculation is not responsible for the increase
in food prices, it’s responsible for the volatility of food
prices but not the initial increase,” Brabeck-Letmathe said. He
described making biofuels from food crops as “nonsense.”